


Unacceptable

by TheWhiteLily



Series: Season Four Premiere Flashfic [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: But Also Not A Fix-It, But Maybe a Bit Not Not Good Too, Canon Compliant, Dysfunctional Relationships, Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Fix-It, For Dysfunctional People, Gen, John is a Bit Not Good, POV John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is Bad at Feelings, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 20:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9288155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: The first time John went too far in a fistfight,  he was thirteen years old.Or: background for The Scene In The Mortuary





	

**Author's Note:**

> Some violence, but it's mostly implied rather than graphic.

The first time John went too far in a fistfight, he was thirteen years old. A boy at school had said a word he didn’t know, about Harry, a word he hadn’t known meant what Harry was, until he said it in that voice that made it clear that what it meant was something very bad indeed.

He’d been suspended for a week, the other boy’s nose had healed straight, and John had decided to be a doctor, because he never wanted to hurt anyone ever again.

* * *

Medical school was challenging, and John was passing, excelling, but he was finding it hard to breathe among the ordered texts and polite prac partners.  

Eventually, he started playing rugby. Getting on the field in the mud, the tackles and the brutal physicality of it all was like _flying_ , and John spent his whole week of studying counting off the hours until Thursday night’s practice.

When the rugby season finished, it took two weeks for John to decide to join the Army.

* * *

The Army taught him to kill, but it also taught him discipline. It taught him how _not_ to kill.

In becoming consciously aware of how to apply maximum force in every blow, or the maximum effect with minimum force, he became aware of the control he could exercise over his body.

John spent his fits of temper on a punching bag, and spent his control on sparring with the other lads, practicing and larking about.

* * *

The first time John hit Sherlock, it was for a case. It was on the way to Irene Adler’s house.

Sherlock hit first; John hit second, and kept going.

It took Sherlock too long to realise that he should struggle, and by the time he did, John had the upper hand. But the fight didn’t last long—just long enough to remind Sherlock that John was more than just a wind-up toy that would do precisely his bidding and no more than that.

He looked somewhat bemused when John finally let him go, but not offended.

* * *

The second time John hit Sherlock was after the case at Baskerville.

Things were a little chilly in the flat in the weeks following, as John went about his business and pretended not to be having nightmares, and Sherlock went about his business and pretended not to be put out that John wasn’t more impressed at his cleverness.

Eventually, it happened. Sherlock had hustled John out of the flat on a case of robbery—a simple, low-level thug whose crime John would have thought somewhat below Sherlock’s level—but when the chase through the empty parking garage of a shopping centre in a dodgy area of town ended easily, the man submitting to a citizen’s arrest without much fight to speak of, Sherlock had looked satisfied.

He glanced around the area, checked the zip-ties on the criminal’s hands, before leading John around a corner a few feet away, and turning to face him.

“All right,” he said. “There’s no CCTV cameras here, no passers by, no open sky, and Mycroft will have no reason to think the chase ended as smoothly as it did. Hit me.”

He shook himself out and bounced on his toes a little. His hands were open, spread to the side.

“I—what?” said John. “Is this for the case?”

“No, this is for you,” said Sherlock. “And for me. You’re angry, John; it’s not going away, and that’s _mildly annoying_ to me. You know what I am. You don’t think I’ve learnt my lesson, and you’re probably right. I don’t get social cues, John. I’ve worked out it was not good, but I don’t _feel_ the empathy, not really. I _will_ feel _this_.”

“Sherlock,” said John, “that's not how this works.  This is _not_ how you normally resolve a—”

“Oh, when have we ever been _normal_ , John?” snapped Sherlock. “It’s _fine_. I’ll be perfectly safe, doctor on hand and everything. Now _hit me_. Make me feel it, the way you’re feeling it. Make me _remember_ not to drug you and lock you in a box and sit there with my feet up on the desk in comfort while I deliberately do my very best to terrify you out of your little—”

John put him down with the first punch, but it didn’t stop him getting in a second. Or a third.

* * *

“Feel better?” asked Sherlock. He winced as he pushed himself up onto his hands, but waved away John’s offer of assistance.

Sherlock was a good fighter, John knew.  They worked out together semi-regularly. The lives they led, it was only sensible for them to both be ready for whomever they might meet.

He hadn’t fought back today. Hadn’t tried to protect himself, beyond the basic human reflexes to turn away and curl; he'd just kept raising his face again to show he was ready.

“Uh,” said John. “Not sure. You?”

“Oh, just marvellous,” said Sherlock, feeling along the side of his jawbone.  He spat on the ground beside him.

Blood. No teeth.

John had been careful. He was a doctor; he knew precisely how much force the human body could tolerate without serious injury. And a soldier. He knew how to apply it.

“You think it’s going to stick?” he asked, watching Sherlock’s movements carefully, eyeing him for any sign of unusually strong pain or weakness that might indicate deeper damage.

Sherlock shrugged, then looked like he regretted the motion, putting a hand on his collarbone.  He’d fallen hard at one point, dazed enough to put out an awkward arm to catch his whole weight instead of falling properly.

Placidly, he let John take the arm and run it through the full range of shoulder movements without showing any sign of increased distress.

“We’ll have to see,” he said.

* * *

The third time John hit Sherlock was more spontaneous. As were the fourth and the fifth, in close succession. Then again, Mary and the assorted restaurant staff had kept pulling him away each time, so he wasn’t entirely sure whether the message had got through.

* * *

When Mary died, John didn’t hit Sherlock.

He didn’t blame Sherlock.

He didn’t think of Sherlock at all.

Mary, who was a figment of John’s imagination, brought up Sherlock quite a lot, but that didn’t really count. She’d brought him up a lot when she was alive, too, it was no wonder he couldn’t imagine her leaving the topic alone, but John just… didn’t think of him.

He was busy. With work, with imaginary Mary, with drinking, and wallowing in grief, and on the weekends because two days was about as long as he could hold himself together at a stretch, with Rosie.

He certainly didn’t think of hitting Sherlock hard, again and again as he gasped and sobbed in pain, because….

Well, because he didn’t think of Sherlock at all.

And when Sherlock came at Culverton with a scalpel, John’s first reaction was conciliatory. His second was competent and efficient; he disabled the arm with the blade, knocked it away, and then removed Sherlock from the situation, pinning him back against the drawers in the mortuary.

“What are you doing?” he yelled in his face, and slapped him—an age-old treatment for hysteria. “WAKE UP!”

Sherlock’s face rocked sideways, then rolled back to look at him: surprised, drug-addled, barely aware of what was going on. _Mildly upset_.

Their gazes locked for a second, before Sherlock’s eyelids dipped at him: a signal of permission that made John suddenly alight with rage.

How dare he.

_How dare he?!_

He thought _that_ could fix _this_?

John didn’t really remember what happened next, although it came back in flashes afterwards: in the ache of his knuckles and the strained muscles of his leg; the memory of a breathy, high-toned cry of pain. He remembered hands pulling him back, remembered Culverton saying he didn’t think Sherlock was a danger anymore.  He wasn't wrong.

“Leave him be,” Culverton had said.

“No, it’s okay,” Sherlock managed from the floor, panting, broken. “Let him do whatever he wants. He’s entitled.”

He looked up at John, and it was like seeing a mirror of his own pain reflected back at him; someone else who finally understood the depths of what John had lost when Mary, when Mary had…

“I killed his wife.”

It was almost a question; one that John was very happy to answer.

“Yes, you did,” he said.

* * *

“I really hit him, Greg,” said John, looking up from his knuckles. “Hit him hard.”

“You were just...”

“No. No, it was more than that.”

That sat in the silence between them for a long moment, before Greg spoke again.

“Do I need to get some paperwork?”

John considered it.

Once, Sherlock had looked at John straight after he'd killed a man and said: _Let’s avoid the court case._

 _Let him do whatever he wants_ , he’d said today.

But it was past time to make a clean break from many habits associated with Sherlock Holmes.

“Uh, yeah, actually,” he said. “Yeah, I think you do.”

* * *

After a minute, when John’s tears against his palm and Sherlock’s chest had slowed—when the grip of Sherlock’s hands on his neck and shoulder, the heavy weight of his cheek against John’s head had become less an anchor and more the warm walls of an intimate bubble just holding back the loneliness of the past months—John said the words he’d been thinking since he’d sat with Greg in the interview room, staring at his split knuckles.

The words he’d been thinking since he’d looked down at the beaten form of his… former… or so he’d thought then, the form of his _best friend_ lying in the hospital bed where John had put him, or at least had hastened his inevitable arrival.

Before he’d ignored his gut feelings about Culverton Smith, cast off his instinctive faith in Sherlock’s methods, given Sherlock his old cane as a way to finally close the circle and say goodbye, and had walked away, leaving him easy pickings for his imaginary but oh-so-real serial killer.

At the time he’d considered that not having to face this, at least, would be an advantage of that decision.

“Mary’s not the only one I let down,” John said, to Sherlock’s chest. He couldn’t have said it to his face, couldn’t have said it looking at the bruises, at the petechial hemorrhaging from the suffocation that he almost hadn’t made it back in time to stop. “I can’t hit you again, Sherlock, I can’t. I—I lost control, in the morgue. I hit you hard. _Hard_. I didn’t know what I was doing. I broke ribs—and you _couldn’t_ fight back, you were in no fit state. I could have killed you.”

“You wouldn’t have,” said Sherlock, his faith unshaken. The strength of the grip holding John steady didn't falter. “You had cause, provocation, but you would _never_ have, John Watson.”

John wasn’t sure. Sherlock had always shared Mary’s simple faith in his goodness, and what a burden it was to try to live up to that.  And to fail to.

“I _can’t_ hit you again, Sherlock,” he repeated. “Not ever. Not at all. You mustn’t try to make me. Because I _won’t.”_

“I won’t,” said Sherlock, squeezing John's shoulder lightly. His voice was a baritone rumble against John’s forehead. “I suspect I won’t need to. I think… I think this time, the lesson in empathy might have sunk in.”

**Author's Note:**

> _Why does everything have to be understandable? Why can’t some things be unacceptable and we just say that?_
> 
> I don’t know, John. But I did need to write something about this, and I didn't want to make you quite the bastard that particular scene made you in the middle of an episode I otherwise loved the hell out of. I’m not sure I helped, but I've done my best.
> 
> No excuse for domestic violence.
> 
> Edit to add: John and Sherlock's status as ex-flatmates qualifies as a "domestic relationship" under British law. I stand by my personal characterisation of this event as it happened in canon as domestic violence, but I understand that others' mileage may vary, and I expect it would not have been charged as such. Also: I do not find John's actions unbelievable, given his mental state, but I don't believe there can be any excuse that makes it less unacceptable.


End file.
